Trent Reznor, the man behind industrial rock\/metal outfit Nine Inch Nails, comments on writing inside versus outside the studio and coming up with rules to get the process moving:<\/p>\n
“By the time I did [albums] Downward Spiral and The Fragile I had a studio to work in, so I would write in that environment,” he explains. “What I found was that songwriting and the arranging and production and the sound design process became the same thing. A song would start with a drum loop or a visual and eventually a song would emerge out of it and that was the song. This time I got back to starting with lyrics and words and really separating the process into songwriting and arranging and production. And when I came out here I just set up a piano, drum machine and computer to record vocals into.”<\/em><\/p>\n
…\u00a0This time [for album With Teeth] he forced himself to write two songs every 10 days, and he recorded them even more quickly.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
“If I come up with rules or limitations it focuses me in a direction,” he explains. “And those rules can change if you realize it’s a dumb idea. You start to mutate it to see what fits best. In this case one of the early concepts was I wanted it to sound played. Not like a garage band, necessarily, but with computers it’s easy to fix things and make everything perfect, and sometimes you can lose an element of humanity and imperfection. And the message emotionally was to be a bit frail and unsure of yourself, so we treated things as performances.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n